


Infinite Recreations

by bbcsherlockian



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: First Kiss, M/M, POV Sherlock Holmes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-14
Updated: 2013-11-14
Packaged: 2018-01-01 11:23:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1044250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bbcsherlockian/pseuds/bbcsherlockian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So I’m standing here and you’re walking towards me. There’s no significance, there is nothing spectacularly abnormal but you are getting nearer and I am finding it increasingly difficult to breathe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Infinite Recreations

So I’m standing here and you’re walking towards me. There’s no significance, there is nothing spectacularly abnormal but you are getting nearer and I am finding it increasingly difficult to breathe. 

My hands are fisted at my sides and I can feel the material of my dressing gown scraping across my knuckles; in this tense moment of stillness the sharp contact feels more like pain than comfort, heightened and searing. You raise your foot to take the first step, and although I’m not looking at you directly I can see your face, my face, reflected in the mirror hanging just above the mantlepiece. Your expression is almost glowing in its clarity but I can’t translate, I can’t read your features. I blink and the glass distorts dramatically, twisting both our visage and our bodies, making the room crumple into meaningless colours before retracting back into a semblance of normality. Everything seems perfect - straight, precise edges and smarting lines cutting into the reflection - but something is slightly jilted and the meticulousness of this illusion makes me nauseous. 

Your foot hits the carpet and the softened noise of your tread shatters the looking glass into an infinite number of pieces, flooding my view with a bloody haze. The shards appear to retract into themselves and suddenly mirrors line every surface. My own eyes follow me as I spin inside my own head; I am the original lost in a sea of unidentifiable replicas. I alone am trapped by my reflection.

Your face, an image that was far too near and terrifyingly palpable before, is now all I have left for warmth and familiarity. And yet when I turn towards you every angle has been elegantly crafted into polished glass, every taint of softness and gentleness destroyed by an icy membrane. I reach out to touch it, as if the smallest brush of my fingertips will wreak cracks across this estranged facade but I am met by only my duplicate. This is not who you are. 

You take another step and my extremities are burning with the promise of your proximity, but the glass is in my throat now, my chest, my lungs, tearing and ripping into my cells. When I dare to glance again the mirrors are empty, desolate; I thought the disappearance of my reflection would calm me, but has instead created an even greater sense of unease that I can taste unpleasantly on my tongue, and you are moving far too fast but not fast enough. If only I could touch you, if only I could fracture that immovable sheen. 

You are standing before me and it’s too quick, too sudden. I’m not ready but I can feel the glass under my skin and it scalds me in its urgency. It’s mockingly painful. You smile but it’s lost to me under miles and miles of cold, polished metal, screaming its repetition and reiteration of the same image over and over and over again. It’s nothing, it’s nothing. Your cold lips brush mine and every surface erupts and fragments; somehow we are sheltered in one another and - oh, how I have missed the life to your eyes. The room continues to convulse around us but the palm of my hand is pressed against the hardness of your skull and we are both so very, very alive. 

I am told that I am unique and yet I was imitated and reproduced without a moment’s hesitation. Even now, with your mouth and my mouth being indistinguishable amongst the mass of vitality and colour; even now, when it clear that you see no other reflection of me, I cannot fathom why you want this. I cannot fathom how you are unaware of the remnants of shards buried deep between my ribs.


End file.
